Posted
by
samzenpus
on Monday December 12, 2011 @01:18PM
from the disks-must-flow dept.

nk497 writes "The hard disk shortage caused by the flooding in Thailand will cost Intel $1 billion in lost revenue, the company said. It had initially predicted revenue of $14.7bn this quarter, but that will now be $13.7bn, it said. 'Sales of personal computers are expected to be up sequentially in the fourth quarter,' Intel said. 'However, the worldwide PC supply chain is reducing inventories and microprocessor purchases as a result of hard disk drive supply shortages.'"

I just purchased one. I was planning on buying a HDD until prices went up. Then saw a deal on an Intel 320 series 120gb that seemed decent, plus I'd been wanting to try one. They were running a nice rebate not long ago. I haven't regretted it (yet), and I've noticed a major difference in boot time.

SSDs are fine for OS disks and applications, but for anything requiring serious data storage, they're just too small and expensive. Lots of people these days use their computers for storing and watching movies; you need terabyte hard drives for that.

Some people (like me) do both. There are some things I want to stream. Other things, I'd like to have a copy around to watch whenever I want, including when I'm offline. Movies and TV shows are not all created equal.

Exactly. Plus, streamed movies have crap quality because of the extreme compression used. For many things, it's sufficient, but if you want to watch BBC's Life movies, for instance, it's definitely not.

You've got a lot of factors at work there. First is pixel density and seating distance, then the quality of the projector and room setup, and finally the quality of the TV you're comparing it against. Yes a poorly setup room with a low quality projector would be vastly inferior to a good 40" TV.

I have found that crap movies are still crap on my 46" Sony Bravia in a dark room and great movies are still great on my 110" 720p projector setup which I watch on a wall I painted gray a few years ago which has screw holes in some intrusive places.Oddly enough, the quality of the content is far more interesting to me than the quality of my setup. But, poor H.264 encoding quality is unacceptable at any resolution. This is 2011, even real-time encoding using Intel QuickSync at 5Mbps is pretty damn good quali

I don't notice a big enough difference between Blu Ray and Netflix HD streaming to buy any Blu Ray discs/rent them from Redbox, etc. I'd rather be playing Portal 2/MW3/Battlefield 3/Gears Of War on the ol' 70" before watching some HD film on it.

The real problem here is that there is a large gap between what the two types of drives (cheaply) hold and"normal users" are likely to fall somewhere in between.

You don't need to be a video hoarder to run out of space on a smaller drive. You just need to use your machine for more than a web terminal. If you are a producer or consumer of anything, all of the stuff together will likely exceed the capacity of a smaller SSD drive.

It's not just one thing but a combination of things that could push you over the rather meagre 120G you are likely to find on a cheap-enough SSD.

Beyond that, things tend to get expensive quick.

At that point, an oversized and somewhat overpriced HDD is still cheaper.

The real problem here is that there is a large gap between what the two types of drives (cheaply) hold and"normal users" are likely to fall somewhere in between.

Quoted for truth.

I have many friends who could possibly do with just 60GB; but I also have a lot of friends who have 100GB+ of baby photos and movies. How smart would it be to suggest a SSD to one of my friends knowing that it may be a matter of short while before they too are filling their tiny SSD with baby photos?

Suggesting anything less than 160GB for a friend seems like taking a gamble, unless I know a lot about their usage patterns.

SSDs came long long after 1 tera hard disks, so no ssd prices won't drop as a result of this, not by much more than they are already declining anyways. I'd just assume everybody ALREADY HAS their spinning disk storage solution, and if not your timing makes you unlucky unless you can hold off, the prices really are bs right now.

SSDs came long long after 1 tera hard disks, so no ssd prices won't drop as a result of this, not by much more than they are already declining anyways. I'd just assume everybody ALREADY HAS their spinning disk storage solution, and if not your timing makes you unlucky unless you can hold off, the prices really are bs right now.

I'm waiting to see how well SSDs hold up. Probably a couple years before I buy a large one. I've had some poor luck with high density non-volatile memory and am interested in the durability and reliability of SSDs.

So far so good, I've still got original OCZ Vertex MLC drives ticking along just great. I think a lot depends on what kind of life expectancy you need out of a drive. Typically I was replacing desktop HDDs every 3-5 years which, for even a "power user" at home, is a fraction of the lifespan of an SSD. After putting an SSD in one computer I was hooked, the difference is just crazy. If you're trying to decide whether or not to spend another $100 to upgrade the CPU in a new computer build, just replace the

Uhhh...Tiger is selling a 1Tb Seagate for like $60, I'm sure you can find the link on sellout.woot if you didn't get the email. While that isn't as cheap as the $35 I paid for a 1Tb Samsung frankly that isn't THAT bad a price, hell the 1.5Tb was like $99,its not gonna break the bank.

Wow, I haven't been to woot in ages, I've been using techbargains for the longest time, I am thinking of newegg however when I think of the hdd costs since the flooding crisis. And of course you do realize on a hdd you have to factor a lot more (well not A LOT) than storage = money (ex. wd green, wd blue, wd black).

I didn't spend all this money on a SAN to have users storing files on local hard disks. Small, fast, quiet, low-power, low-heat disks for the desktop and a combination of fast/slow on the network storage system to store files. The reality is manufacturers stuff 500GB HDD down our throats for desktop computers, when I could just as easily get a 50GB SSD for the same price, which is more storage than any of my workstations need (disclaimer: healthcare).

Maybe for your environment, SSDs and a SAN makes sense. Not everyone has the same environment: home users with desktops, and developers at smaller companies (places that don't have SANs), for instance, need lots of space. Yes, for a big company with a well setup IT department with centralized storage, you really don't need a big HD on each desktop, but lots of places aren't like that. In fact, at the large companies I've worked at (including Intel), they didn't have SANs either (or at least not set up pr

Sure, I absolutely agree with you. I'm just making the counterpoint to the parent post. Not everyone needs massive slow hard drives, especially in a typical business environment. I can't imagine why our accountants need the standard 300+ GB HDDs in their workstations. The only reason they have them is because it's the smallest drive that's being manufactured anymore. Never once have I had an anyone in operations, accounting, or HR or any clinician (or anyone I can think of, ever) ask for more local sto

They offered some major, like $100+, rebates recently. However even so, they are still pricey. SSDs are coming down in price, but for most users they are still too much money. While most people don't need the multi-TB drives they can get these days, they also can't function very well with a tiny 80GB SSD. Somewhere in the 200-500GB range is probably what most people need. At that size, they are still pretty expensive.

Eventually I'm sure SSDs will take over, though it make take a new technology (as in someth

Trying to do NTFS recovery from linux has NEVER ended well for me, unless it involved backing data up with ddrescue. Stick with Microsoft's tools, theres a reason so few (if any?) linux tools are capable of dealing with NTFS corruption. Plug the drive into a second computer and do chkdsk/v/f/r on it, in my experience it is VERY unlikely that it will not make things better (if at all possible).

A little scary for us, as we have precisely one 1TB drive on the shelf right now. One of our notebooks had its drive go south, and I had to rob an old 80gb from a dead notebook. Still, I'm holding out. I don't particularly feel like paying three times or more what they were worth a few months ago.

I'm hopefully going to get some budget for some custom routers and I'll be going with SSDs so my next project won't be impacted.

The loss seems all big and impressive and such until you actually bother to look at both numbers and realize that it really isn't so bad after all. What this really goes to show just how BIG the PC business is and how a relatively small setback can be portrayed as this dire tragedy.

I tried to order a Seagate Barracuda SATA 6GB 3TB Drive and Newegg and they wanted $400. I ended up buying two Seagate Expansion USB 2.0 3TB Drives for $199 each and I removed the Seagate Barracuda SATA 6GB 3TB Drives from the enclosures and saved $400 on my total order.

IMHO: I'm surprised that SSD manufacturers are not taking advantage of the HDD shortage and giving deals left and right. Intel could profit greatly right now lowering their SSD prices just slightly. PC manufacturers will benefit by selling computers and the end user will get that "speedy" system for only a slight increase in price. The higher price will definitely pay for itself considering the boot and operating speed of a SSD over HDD. Granted that's with the consideration you didn't buy a system with 1GB of memory and a Celeron proc running Win7.

Obviously anyone looking for large capacity drives is still SOL. I know some local stores in the area are still selling drives for reasonable prices until they run out. I doubt they'll bother to stock some or any at all after that. I'm sure they don't want to be left holding $2-300 drives that will be selling for at least half that a couple months from now.

On another note, who had the bright idea of creating a single point of failure? I wonder if WD, Seagate, etc setup their networks all with single points of failure. I understand it's cheaper but if you can't make drives, you're not making money.

Given the opportunities that the current market presents, it is in the SSD industry's best interest to take a hit on profit today to secure larger market share tomorrow. Even more so for an single player to gain a long-term competitive advantage over its peers. Regrettably, as we all know, public US companies have a 3-month horizon making strategies that sacrifice short-term profits for long-term gains extremely difficult to implement.

To me it seems there isn't really separate ssd and "traditional" hard drive markets competing for each other. They're both in the storage market.
To do the auto-analogy: Selling sports cars at a loss to increase the share of sports cars on the road isn't going to do much for the long term share of sports cars. People will still buy the type of car that meets their criteria: Price, practicality, ego/car-peen. A temporary reduction in price will mean a temporary increase in sales.

If you assume everything's going to go back to the way it was, then yes. But you assume people aren't creatures of habit and will always to a proper evaluation of the alternatives, particularly a SSD they've never tried. Right now they have an opprtunity to say "Hey SSDs are expensive but HDDs are expensive now too. So why not try an SSD?" and chances are they'll like it. You have to believe that in a few years SSDs will be big enough and cheap enough for "most people" and that this will accelerate that tra

Good thing we can't make hard drives any where else in the world! I love globalization. I don't know anyone in the states that could be trusted to work at a plant making hard drives. They'd expect to be able to pay for food, shelter, and clothing, and we can't have that!

If you can't do, report: you're smart enough to s/loses/dives but not smart enough to s/dives/forestalls.

Now the reader who ordinarily fails to distinguish "dives" from "loses" as processed through the filter of law-of-the-jungle public-company quarterly reporting intervals will fail to notice the giant Bill Gates reality-distortion-apparatus strapped to face.

I was in my local CompUSA store over the weekend. Microsoft is offering a $20 rebate on Windows Home if you buy it from Tiger Direct or CompUSA by 12/15/2011. Since I'm in the middle of putting together a new computer I went to pick up a copy. You have to buy some hunk of PC hardware at the same time as the OS if you want the rebate, so I looked at their hard drive selection expecting to not see much because of the 'shortage'. Well they had a TON of Seagate and WD drives in 250GB, 320GB, 500GB, 1TB and

Wrong. In American capitalism, if your company isn't constantly growing or constantly making a bigger profit, then it's "dying". Then your stock will be downgraded by ratings agencies and stockholders will sell it off.

It isn't true for privately-held companies, but for publicly-traded companies it is.

If you don't make more money this year than you did last year (because of lower bonus perhaps, due to bad economy), do you get gun and shoot yourself in the head? "Oh no! I made 3% less money this year than I did last year! It's the end! I'm dying, I might as well end it all now."

Somehow I think even most of them are smart enough to know that financially, it's more important how much you have in your bank account, not how much you make every year or quarter (so for instance, if you get a giant windfall one year and save it up, it doesn't matter if you don't get the same windfall every single year).

It's only the idiotic sycophantic fans of American crony capitalism that try to convince us all otherwise.

The problem with a company that isn't growing is that it isn't making any progress expanding into new areas and finding new customers. Which means it's just waiting for the next generation of tech or (for non-IT companies) the first disaster/neighborhood change/etc to kill the business. In other words, it's just waiting in limbo for bankruptcy.
Fact is markets change.. what you sell today is tomorrows commodity, or worse, an obsolete good. Companies and business models have to change. Anyone who doesn't wi

Oh please, what an utterly stupid attitude. Not all companies are tech companies. If the makers of Twinkies find their company isn't growing, what exactly is the problem as long as they're profitable and their workers are well-paid (and presumably their executives too)? There's only so many Twinkies you can sell; people aren't going to abandon all other foods and only eat Twinkies (and even if they did, eventually your company's growth would then be tied to the population growth rate). You don't need to move into new areas; there's already other companies selling other types of food, so they're probably going to do better at it than you are since they've been doing it longer and have a brand reputation in those areas, whereas you have a brand reputation for unhealthy junk food, so you're not likely to find much success moving into, say, high-priced organic snack foods compared to the companies already competing in that space. Twinkies have been around forever, they're not going anywhere, so even if the Twinkie company stops growing, that doesn't mean it's dying, it means it's reached a plateau.

There's tons of small companies that have been around for many years (or decades, or even longer), that haven't grown because they don't need to or want to grow. As long as the owners are happy with the profit they're making, why would they want to make the company bigger, and have to deal with all the headaches that come with having a bigger operation and more shareholders yelling about how they want to do things?

It's called an example. Maybe if Hostess listened to me instead of some moron MBAs chasing after constant growth, they wouldn't have filed for bankruptcy. Lemme guess, sometime before they filed bankruptcy, they laid off some people so the CEO could show they doubled profit for one quarter and collect a big bonus before looking for a new gig, and then his successor got blamed for the ensuing problems.

You imagine twinkies aren't going anywhere, but you forget/ignore the incredible number of brands that disappear every year. Foods go in and out of style all the time. Considering the restaurant industry has one of the highest failure rates of any market, it's really a terrible example.

Sorry, it was just supposed to be an example, which I picked off the top of my head. Maybe I should have picked a fictional company making manhole covers or something.

But what you describe ("business drying up") is exactly the type of thing that could have been prevented if the owner continued growing their company and finding new markets to satisfy.

Or, by getting distracted by attempting to grow the company for no good reason and find new markets instead of continuing to keep their existing customers happy, they end up pissing off all their existing customers and then they go bankrupt.

Yeah, it's weird how being consistently profitable is viewed as a bad thing, isn't it? If you aren't doubling your profits every few quarters, by golly, you're a failure.

Incidentally, this is what leads companies to boost their profit levels through massive workforce cuts. Then the CEO can say, "I doubled profits in the third quarter!" He just leaves out the part where he did it by slashing a third of the staff, which means all the customers get shitty support/service, and whatever it is the company actuall

Yes, but by the time the shit hits the fan with pissed-off customers ditching the company, the CEO will have taken his giant bonus (from doubling profits for one quarter), and moved on to "explore other opportunities" or collected a golden parachute.

Yep. That's why this sort of thing can just keep happening. The CEO won't be around for the long-term fallout, so all the blame will fall on the next guy, and the one after him, as the company keeps floundering and no one can figure out why.

Amateur. First you cut R&D, that's long term. Then you cut the engineers, that's mid term. Then you cut support/service, which is short term. Then you bail for a competing company so you're forced to sell your options and shares. As it crash and burns, paint yourself as the great CEO that was the only thing holding that company together. Do it with enough confidence and they won't see you were the one tearing it apart. Non-sociopaths tend to believe sociopaths because they themselves couldn't pull off such a baldfaced lie. That's how they get to hop from one top position to the next...

Don't be silly. American capitalism is indeed a form of capitalism. Another name for it is "crony capitalism". It is capitalistic, but it's tilted massively in favor of the cronies (and their lobbyists), rather than being a system where there's a "level playing field" and new and upcoming players can unseat older companies by having better products or services.

Yes, the invisible hand has been shackled and had several fingers liberated. One of the fingers, the middle one I believe, said "no government bailouts." It was replaced with a stick with dog shit on the end that says "too big to fail."

Wrong. In American capitalism, if your company isn't constantly growing or constantly making a bigger profit, then it's "dying". Then your stock will be downgraded by ratings agencies and stockholders will sell it off.

It isn't true for privately-held companies, but for publicly-traded companies it is.

What rubbish!

Go back to playing your video games, twittering or posting your life to Facebook and leave assessment of corporate growth, finances and stock prices to people who have at least a middling understanding of them.

Never seen a stock price go up when a company slashed workforce? That's not what you do when you are growing a company, you're hiring when you are growing (or at the very least you are contracting labour to be performed for your company.) It's hardly anecdotal, either, with decades of

It's really kind of worse than that in this case. Intel *is* growing, it's profits *are* increasing, and by every single reasonable measure they're a secure company with good potential for future profits. They're being punished for failing to meet their own quarterly estimates. Estimates that they *clearly* missed for no other reason than a completely unpredictable natural disaster that almost certainly won't happen again any time soon. Next quarter Intel will be back to making more money than they can

Basically the value of a share of stock is determined from a discounted cash flow analysis of future earnings of the company in question. Since this analysis includes an estimate of the growth of the company any change in the growth outlook must then in fact affect the value of the stock.

companies are non-ethical and we allow that! that's problem #1. an entity that only exists to line its pockets is against the goals of a peaceful society.

The thing is, I'm not really sure what you'd replace this system with.

After all, the only reason most people bother to show up at work every days is so they can collect a paycheck and "line their pockets" so to speak. Who'd really want to bother being an accountant if they weren't getting paid for it, after all? Or a janitor?

Profit beyond that which is necessary to cover risk (unfortunate troubles) is theft

In a capitalist system, that's not theft. If the price is agreed to by all involved parties then it's fair.

A company may boost it's profits for any number of reasons, not all of which are driven by pure greed - bankrolling some money for future growth being the obvious one. Or would you prefer that companies grow by borrowing, which involves usury (which, by your too-much-profit principle, may be a more pernicious form of theft)?

In a capitalist system, that's not theft. If the price is agreed to by all involved parties then it's fair.

Agreeing to a price based on incomplete knowledge may be legal, but it's not what I'd call fair. And most people make purchasing decisions with little or no knowledge other than what someone else is asking for a similar or the same item. Indeed, that's often the only information that's available.

With many items/services the buyer doesn't have to worry too much about it, because other providers will s

Most people aren't intelligent enough to know when they are getting ripped off there is huge assymetry of information in the costs of goods people buy and the price they see. We don't work on rationality, the mind does not work according to enlightenment principles which the free market is a descendant of.

But you also have to factor in being paid back for risks you have already taken. If I start my own company, which I bankroll with some of my own money as well as free (or underpriced) labor, then shouldn't I get paid back for the "risks" over the subsequent years? What about the other people who bankroll my company by buying "stock"? The whole financial system is based upon being rewarded for taking risks. You seem to be arguing that companies are making to much money for the risks they are taking, but

Profit beyond that which is necessary to cover risk (unfortunate troubles) is theft

Really? Tell you what you swing by my house I will pay you only in your material cost to paint my house. You dont deserve anything beyond that. It would just be you stealing from me. You may be a bit angry at this point at what I said. But it is the logical extreme of what you are saying.

Profit is inherent in the concept of trade. Two people agree to an exchange because both value what they receive more than what they had. In a very real way, a fair trade involves both parties profiting. In different ways, true, but profit nevertheless. This drives trade, and has for thousands of years. For producers, they generally receive the profit as money. Intel is a producer.

If this fact did not hold, trade would not create profit, there would be no incentive to trade or produce, and the entire system of production would collapse. Incidentally, this is also why Marxist Communism doesn't work... or one reason, anyways.

If you're only metric is money, then, yes. Fair trade is (or should be...) equitable, not "fair". Money allows some degree of realization of "equitability", but it is fundamentally just a physical realization, but a very useful abstraction indeed (even if said money is backed/legitimized by gold, umbilical cords, whatever). That most of our currencies these days are fiat currencies doesn't really diminish that role of it in the economy (you know, the abstract realization of "value"), as said money is worth

In which the strong what? You want to finish that thought there? Never mind, I know where it's headed. And to which I say, you are correct, but our system is NOT capitalism. If it was, there'd be no such thing as "too big to fail" and government bailouts of stupid corporations who can't manage their money intelligently would never happen.

Even if we didn't have the screwed up financial system that we have, we still would not have capitalism. We have public schools, public sewers, public defense (police, firefighters, national guard, military). We have never had capitalism (at least according to your definition) and I prefer it that way. While it may sometimes screw things up (like "too big to fail") and we have to modify the system to fix prevent those problems from occurring in the future, I much prefer it to the absolute anarchy that "t

You are only looking at the 'factory' side of the question. Who makes a buying decision based on the 'cost to produce'? No one. People, including people in companies, make buying decisions based on value to them. In your example, the widget must have been worth at least $11 to you. What if the widget, that you think has an $11 value, actually cost $100 to make? Would you be willing to pay $101 for it (even though the value to you is only $11) just because the factory is only making $1 profit? On the

The majority of those parts are sold (either directly or indirectly via a motherboard manufacturer) to OEMs who turn them into computers. Hard drives are a key component in most computers (occasionally you see a SSD only machine but it's pretty rare) so if the OEMs are supply constrained on hard drives they will reduce their purchases

Consider the PC component market: products constantly being introduced, replaced, obseleted, along with pretty considerably-paced devaluation; parts that were fairly recently top-of-the-line are now middle-of-the-line. It's no wonder an OEM would want to minimize stock on hand.

Something about the way they reached the $1 billion figure smells fishy to me...

Somewhere I saw the figure on how much of their income comes from commodity PCs vs servers - servers are where the money is. Servers without drives would still be in demand, but servers with drives wouldn't meet demand. Not sure what the split is now. I don't think Intel makes much off storage devices.

Intel does not sell computers. They sell processors to people who sell computers. Those people can't built computers without hard drives, so they are buying fewer processors. Not that hard to figure out.

I don't know about that, because while Bulldozer wasn't a big hit Bobcat is frankly selling so fast the CEO had them ramp down some of the desktop production to give them more Bobcats, along with ending production of all the Deneb and Thuban chips. I just walked into Walmart today and they were unpacking a pallet load of desktops loaded with e-350s (not bad at $399 with a 20 inch TFT and 500Gb HDD), and looking at their laptops and netbooks I'd say a good 80%+ were E-Series or A-Series. And of course all of

Something about the way they reached the $1 billion figure smells fishy to me...

Those people can't built computers without hard drives, so they are buying fewer processors. Not that hard to figure out

I agree that it seems fishy. To say "I was guessing I would make $14, but it turned out I only made $13" and then to make the leap to "therefore I lost $1" seems wrong. You didn't lose $1, you just guessed wrong. Then to go farther and say "I can say that the $1 I lost was all because of this reason." make

Because Intel has never sold computer technology in the past, so they really have no idea what their sales would likely be. Even though they have 40+years of sales data to correlate this information. Something tells me their speculation is built on much more solid data and algorithms than your analysis is.

It doesn't say they 'lost' $1B, it says they lowered their expected revenue by $1B. How do they know the amount and reason? Simple. There are only 3 weeks left in the year. Their sales are not where they expected/wanted them to be - they are $1B lower. They call their largest customers and say 'why are your actual purchases lower than projected' and the customer says 'can't get hard drives, so no need for processors'.

Exactly. I expected to earn a million last year, but I didn't have much work and only managed a mere 3% of my goal. Does that count as operating losses? Perhaps I should also include the $200 million I lost because my lotto ticket didn't hit...